Kristin Lavransdatter : The Cross - Sigrid Undset

The final book in the trilogy begins two years after Erlend's punishment for his part in the treasonous plot that almost cost him his life. Kristin & her family are back at her childhood home, Jørundgaard, as Erlend's properties are forfeit to the Crown.  Erlend feels like an outsider among the people on Kristin's estate. His manager, Ulf, has also come to oversee the work on the farm & he's resented as well. Kristin, too, is still remembered by some as the girl who broke her father's heart with her scandalous marriage to Erlend. Kristin's sons are growing up & she tries to keep the youngest, Lavrans & Munan, at her side as long as she can as she watches the older boys chasing girls & getting into scrapes.

But always with that secret, breathless anguish: If things go badly for them, I won't be able to bear it. And deep in her heart she wailed at the memory of her father and mother. They had borne anguish and sorrow over their children, day after day, until their deaths; they had been able to carry this burden, and it was not because they loved their children any less but because they loved with a better kind of love.
Was this how she would see her struggle end? Had she conceived in her womb a flock of restless fledgling hawks that simply lay in her nest, waiting impatiently for the hour when their wings were strong enough to carry them beyond the most distant blue peaks? And their father would clap his hands and laugh: Fly, fly my young birds.

Kristin & Erlend's marriage has always been difficult. Even the heady days of their courtship were marred for Kristin by her awareness of the sin she was committing & her grief at betraying her father. She was devastated by Erlend's imprisonment & did everything she could to help him but now that he's free, she feels the same conflicts she always has. Kristin strives to care for the house & farm while Erlend has no interest in the estate. She became so absorbed in the children that Erlend felt excluded. The misunderstandings between them escalate until Erlend leaves Jørundgaard, ostensibly to look into the state of a hunting lodge some distance away. However, he doesn't return & finally Kristin makes the journey to see him. Their reunion is passionate although she refuses to stay with him in this remote spot. She feels a responsibility to the farm & the children & returns home. Erlend refuses to follow her, even when he learns that Kristin is pregnant. Kristin's pregnancy & her secretive behaviour regarding the child become the subject of gossip, which only intensifies when she names the child after his father - naming a child after a living person was superstitiously avoided at the time. When Erlend finally comes home after one of the boys tells him about Kristin's plight, he's killed in a minor scuffle. Even his dying leaves Kristin conflicted as he dies without a priest to say the last rites.

Kristin's son, Gaute, seduces a young woman, Jofrid, from a rich family. He kidnaps her & brings her back to Jørundgaard where they eventually marry after her relatives are pacified with a handsome settlement. Gaute has been left in charge of the farm as his brothers have chosen other paths. Kristin's relationship with her daughter-in-law is prickly as Jofrid is jealous of Kristin who tries to refrain from criticising Gaute & Jofrid's management of the farm & what she sees as their stinginess with visitors & travellers. Even her relationship with her grandson causes jealousy as Jofrid feels that Kristin is judging her & finding her wanting. Feeling shut out from her home & aware that her presence is causing tension, Kristin decides to enter a convent after undertaking a pilgrimage to atone for her sins.

I loved this book. The story is completely involving but it's the characters that draw the reader in. Kristin & Erlend's relationship is no fairytale & every mistake they make is revealed unflinchingly. Their sons, servants, tenants & other relatives all live in the imagination & the setting of 14th century Norway felt real with the beautiful descriptions of the landscape & the attitudes of the people. My favourite character, though, is Simon Andressøn, the man Kristin rejected when she fell in love with Erlend. Simon has always been there, in the background of the story, kind, honourable, more than a little dull. He never stops loving Kristin, even after he marries her sister, & helps her to save Erlend from imprisonment. Kristin sees him as a brotherly figure & is oblivious to his true feelings for her. Kristin's skill as a healer saves Simon's son but, as well as her herbs & potions, she also carries out a pagan ritual when it seems that the child will die. This mixture of the pagan & the Christian permeates the book & leads to the sense of spiritual conflict that Kristin & Simon share.

  What had happened when the boy lay ill - that was something he must not and dared not mention. But this was the first time in his life that he reluctantly kept silent about a sin before his parish priest.
  He had thought much about it and suffered terribly over it in his heart. Surely this must be a great sin, whether he himself had used sorcery to heal or had directly lured another person into doing so.
  But he wasn't able to feel remorse when he thought about the fact that otherwise his son would now be lying in the ground. He felt fearful and dejected and kept watch to see if the child had changed afterward. He didn't think he could discern anything.

I see Simon with a permanent worried frown on his face. His relationship with his wife, Ramborg, is blighted by her feelings of inferiority to Kristin & by Simon unconsciously comparing Ramborg's lax household management with Kristin's. He compares himself with Erlend & always finds himself wanting. He's not as handsome or as confident but he's more thoughtful & reliable. Unfortunately they're not the qualities to appeal to a headstrong girl. Even his one infidelity in his first marriage was a fling with a servant girl that resulted in a daughter, Arnbjorg. The girl lives with Simon & he loves her but Ramborg is jealous of her as well & her goodness & quiet efficiency just show up how lazy her stepmother is. Even Simon's death is the result of a minor accident that leads to blood poisoning. Kristin tries to heal him but, even on his deathbed as he tries to tell her of his feelings, she bustles around completely oblivious, not listening to him & he just fades away. It's such a poignant moment & I felt sadder about Simon's fate than anyone else in the book.

I've just finished reading several very long books & all of them are going to be in my Top 10 of the year (at this stage, anyway) - John Forster's Life of Dickens, A N Wilson's biography of Queen Victoria (posts on both of these to come soon) & Kristin Lavransdatter. I seem to be in the mood for very long books at the moment, &, having finished these three over the last week, I'm not really sure what to read next. I've just started Mary Rubio's biography of L M Montgomery which I'm sure will leave me wanting to read more of her fiction.

These are the books I've pulled off the shelves. Virago will be reprinting more Angela Thirkell next year so I really should read some of the Thirkells on my tbr shelves before I order any more. The D E Stevenson online group is reading Celia's House at the moment but I didn't have time to start reading it when they did. Maybe I can catch up? I'm still in the mood for non-fiction & especially books about WWII so the Persephones & the Slightly Foxed edition of Christabel Bielenberg's The Past is Myself are calling me (& isn't it the most gorgeous purple?). Just in case I haven't read enough royal biography, A Royal Experiment is about George III, Queen Charlotte & their family. I'm also thinking about starting Sir Walter Scott's Journal & then reading another big Victorian baggy monster of a biography, the Life of Scott, written by his son-in-law, J G Lockhart. The first edition was in 7 volumes - (the second edition was in 10 volumes!!!) but fortunately I have an abridged version as part of the Delphi Classics Scott.

Kristin Lavransdatter : The Wife - Sigrid Undset

The first part of Kristin Lavransdatter ended with a wedding, but this was not the conventional happy ending of romances & fairy tales. Kristin & Erlend had waited years for this moment & Kristin, especially, had been weighed down by the guilt she felt at transgressing against God's laws as well as deceiving her beloved father. She also realised that she was pregnant & faced the prospect of shaming her parents even more if this became known. Erlend & Kristin travel to his estate at Husaby after the wedding & Kristin begins her new life as a wife & mistress of a great estate. At first, all she can think about is the child that will be born too soon after the wedding. This first section of the book is called The Fruit of Sin. When Erlend finally realises that Kristin is pregnant, he is dismayed but he has never really understood the wrong he did to Kristin in seducing her & encouraging her to carry on their affair. Kristin's labour is horrendous & she barely survives. Her son, Naakkve, is her only consolation. Soon after the birth, she goes on pilgrimage, barefoot & alone except for the baby, to pray at the altar of Christ Church.

And here knelt Kristin with the fruit of her sin in her arms. She hugged the child tight - he was as fresh as an apple, pink and white like a rose. He was awake now, and he lay there looking up at her with his clear, sweet eyes.
Conceived in sin. Carried under her hard, evil heart. Pulled out of her sin-tainted body, so pure, so healthy, so inexpressibly lovely and fresh and innocent. This undeserved beneficence broke her heart in two; crushed with remorse, she lay there with tears welling up out of her soul like blood from a mortal wound.

The pilgrimage soothes Kristin in some ways, & her work at Husaby also helps to relieve her feelings. The estate has been left to run down. Erlend is no farmer & his travels & adventures have left him little time to settle down. Kristin is a good & careful manager & soon gains the respect of the servants & tenants. She has more children - seven sons in all - & her absorption in the children & her lingering sense of grievance over Erlend's past behaviour & thoughtlessness, lead to tensions between them. Erlend's two children from his relationship with Eline are another source of guilt to Kristin. She establishes a good relationship with the boy, Orm, after a rocky start, but Erlend's daughter, Margret, is proud & arrogant. Erlend feels guilty about these children. They're illegitimate & so can't inherit his property. He spoils Margret & is hard on Orm, a frail, gentle boy who will never be a great warrior. He resents Kristin's advice & blames her for supporting Orm & trying to correct Margret.

Kristin's brooding on her sins often threatens to dominate her life. The local priest, Sira Eiliv, counsels her to stop worrying about her own sins. She should pray & do good deeds, much more useful than dwelling on the past. Erlend's brother, Gunnulf, is a priest, & Kristin looks to him for help as well. She also realises that Erlend is not respected by his peers & worries about what this will mean for their future. Erlend is impetuous & rash, not a steady man like her father or Simon Andressøn, the man she rejected when she fell in love with Erlend. Simon has stayed on good terms with her parents. He married a rich widow &, after her death, marries Kristen's younger sister, Ramborg. When Kristin & Erlend travel to her childhood home, Jørundgaard, they see how her father relies on Simon as his health fails.

The political situation in Norway plays a larger role in this book than in the first. The King, Magnus, succeeded to the throne as a child. His mother, Lady Ingebjørg, ruled as Regent but was forced out by another faction. She remarried & left Norway with her new husband, who was considered below her in rank. Some years later, when Magnus began to rule alone, his mother began plotting with some nobles, including Erlend, to return to Norway with one of her other sons. She hoped to regain control of the country through her younger son. When the plan is discovered - partly through Erlend's thoughtlessness - he is arrested & charged with treason. It's now, when their relationship has been nearly destroyed by old resentments, that Kristin is forced to realise how tightly her life is bound up with Erlend & she turns to her brother-in-law Simon to help them both.

He shook hands with his eldest sons and then lifted the smallest ones into his arms, while he asked where Gaute was. "Well, you must give him my greetings, Naakkve. He must have gone off into the woods with his bow the way he usually does. Tell him he can have my English longbow after all - the one I refused to give him last Sunday."
Kristin pulled him to her without speaking a word.
The she whispered urgently, "When are you coming back, Erlend, my friend?"
"When God wills it, my wife."
She stepped back, struggling not to break down. Normally he never addressed her in any other way except by using her given name; his last words had shaken her to the heart. Only now did she fully understand what had happened.

As well as an exciting plot, full of drama & incident, Sigrid Undset gives the reader access to Kristin's mind & heart. There are many beautiful set pieces of quiet description, in the natural world & often in church, as Kristin prays for her dead loved ones,

She sat on the bench along the wall of the empty church. The old smell of cold incense kept her thoughts fixed on images of death and the decay of temporal things. And she didn't have the strength to lift up her soul to catch a glimpse of the land where they were, the place to which all goodness and love and faith had finally been moved and now endured. Each day, when she prayed for the peace of their souls, it seemed to her unfair that she should pray for those that had possessed more peace than  she had ever known since she became a grown woman. Sira Eiliv would no doubt say that prayers for the dead were always good - good for oneself, since the other  person had already found peace with God.

Undset paints a picture of medieval Norway where the pagan past has not quite been banished by the Christian present. There's also a real sense of the loneliness of life in the forests & remote countryside where violence is often the response to unhappiness or a sense of being wronged. Society's laws aren't always respected & the Church struggles to supplant the old gods & the power of the feudal past. I'm looking forward to the last part of the story, The Cross, very much.

Kristin Lavransdatter : The Wreath - Sigrid Undset

Why has it taken me so long to start reading this book? Dani at A Work in Progress read Kristin Lavransdatter back in 2007 & that's when I bought this gorgeous Penguin Deluxe edition. But, I didn't pick it up until a few weeks ago. I was reminded of the book when reading Willa Cather's letters as she knew Undset in New York in the 1920s. The story of Kristin is told in three books & I've just finished the first, The Wreath.

Kristin is a seven year old girl living with her parents in 14th century Norway. She is very close to her father, Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn, & enjoys nothing better than being taken on journeys through the countryside as he inspects his property around their farm, Jørundgaard. Her mother, Ragnfrid, is a quiet, melancholy woman. She has lost several sons, & when the story begins, has only Kristin. On one of these journeys with her father, Kristin wanders away from the campsite & sees a mysterious "elf maiden" beckoning to her from the other side of the river. Kristin is terrified by this apparition that seems to hint at the pagan elements of the country, even though it is nominally Christian. These pagan elements of witchcraft & otherworldly beings are a theme that recurs throughout the story.

Kristin's family has considerable status within their local farming community. Kristin grows up to be beautiful & kind, working hard on the farm & continually reminded of her obligations by her mother. She also helps to care for her young sister, Ulvhild, who was injured in an accident & needs constant care. She is friendly with one of her father's workers, Arne, who is in love with her. Arne isn't considered suitable to offer Kristin marriage &, on the evening that he leaves Jørundgaard for a new job, he asks Kristin to walk with him in the forest to say goodbye. They are watched by Bentein, a man who desires Kristin & attempts to rape her as she returns home. She escapes him but, when the episode becomes known, rumours about Kristin & Arne embarrass Kristin so much that she asks her parents to let her enter a convent for a year. She has also become betrothed to Simon Andressøn, the son of another prominent family. Kristin doesn't love Simon but wishes to please her father, who is in favour of the match. Simon is a rather self-satisfied young man who sees nothing wrong with his future wife acquiring some virtue & good manners from the nuns.

Kristin's life at the convent is not harsh. There are several young girls living there with no intention of entering the cloister. On a visit to a fair, Kristin meets the man with whom she will fall in love. Erlend Nikulausson. Erlend is young, handsome, from a noble family & immediately attracted to Kristin. Unfortunately his life has been one of scrapes with the law & unfortunate relationships. He fell in love with Eline, the beautiful young wife of a much older man. Erlend & Eline fell in love & he took her to his estate, Husaby, where they lived as man & wife. Eline had two children but Erlend has tired of her & she has been left with no reputation or social standing, still officially married to her despised husband. Erlend doesn't tell Kristin about any of this, or the fact that he was excommunicated by the bishop for his behaviour. Kristin is soon in love with Erland & they soon become lovers.

Kristin returns to Jørundgaard, determined to break off her betrothal to Simon but her father disapproves of Erlend & refuses his consent. The lovers manage to meet occasionally but Kristin falls into despair as the years pass & nothing changes. Simon eventually releases her & marries another but her father is resolute. She loves Erlend, even after she finds out about his reckless past but is constantly aware of the sin she is committing, both by being Erlend's lover & deceiving her parents. Eventually, her father relents & allows the marriage to go ahead but the lavish preparations for the wedding only intensify Kristin's forebodings. Erlend's aunt, Fru Aashild, a woman who gave up everything & left her husband for another man, has suffered ostracism & knows what Kristin has suffered. At the wedding, she has some harsh words of advice,

"What should I say to you, Kristin?" the old woman continued, in despair. "Have you lost all your own courage? The time will come soon enough when the two of you will have to pay for everything you've taken - have no fear of that."

A wedding, in this case, is not necessarily the happy ending it often is in fairy tales.

I loved everything about this book. The translation by Tiina Nunnally is excellent, it feels both modern & medieval. The language is modern enough to be readable (no Thees & Thous as there are in an earlier translation I dipped into) yet had a feeling of the medieval world, it wasn't modern enough to be slangy. Undset wrote the novels in the 1920s & was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, partly for Kristin Lavransdatter & also for her other work which includes another multi-volume saga, The Master of Hestviken. Of course, I immediately want to read this even though I still have two books of Kristin to go.

Undset's writing about nature & the natural world is so evocative, it reminded me of Hardy. Medieval life on a farm, with the reliance on the weather, the freezing winters & hardship during bad weather, is beautifully described. For all Kristin's feelings of guilt, there's also a glorious romance at the heart of the book. She's like any young girl, dreaming about a handsome young man, ignoring the moral precepts of her parents in the passion of the moment, imagining how she will punish Erlend for his neglect by dying in childbirth & then realising that that's not a very satisfactory ending for herself. Erlend has charm, & he loves Kristin, determined to marry her no matter how long it takes, but he's a slippery character, thoughtlessly discarding those he has no longer any use for & ignoring both social convention & the law when it suits him. It will be interesting to see how he treats Kristin once they're married. Kristin's journey from child to bride is absorbing & I can't wait to find out what happens after the wedding in Book II, The Wife.

Penguin Deluxe

I've just bought two more of these beautiful Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. They are so beautiful that I can't resist. I have to blame Pam of Travellin' Penguin for the copy of Moby Dick. She's reading along with a group read of this &, although I'm too late to join in, I'm enjoying reading her impressions of the book (Pam's blog is worth reading for lots of other reasons, from the stories about her gorgeous pets to her journeys around Tasmania on her motorbike & her extensive collection of Penguin Books). It's a book I've always wanted to read & I already have a Vintage Classics edition on the tbr shelves but this one is so lovely... I also have problems buying only one book at a time so I bought Dante's Divine Comedy as well.

I have several other Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, mostly of books I already have in other editions, sometimes several other editions. There's no reason to have another copy of Persuasion (three other copies), Cold Comfort Farm (one other copy) or Ethan Frome (two other copies). I've also just realised that I also have ebooks of the Austen & Wharton... I've written before of this disturbing habit of owning multiple copies of a book & I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one & that, four years later, nothing's changed in this house.

I only own one copy of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter & it's a Penguin Deluxe but it's the book I feel guiltiest about. Back in 2007, Dani at A Work in Progress, was reading this book (actually three books in one volume) & I bought a copy fully intending to read along. Well, I didn't, & it's still on the tbr shelves although I'm so glad to own such a beautiful book. I think that cover is one of my favourites of all the books I own.

Apart from beautiful cover design, the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions also have good paper, clear print &, most important of all, a flexible spine so that they sit comfortably in the hand without needing to crack the spine to keep them open. Here's the website if you want to be tempted. I still want the Sense and Sensibility (three other copies)...